The pornography website Pornhub announced last week that its site will no longer be accessible from five additional U.S. states, bringing the total number of states up to 13.
By mid-July, Pornhub will become inaccessible in Indiana, Idaho, Kansas, and Nebraska. Residents of Kentucky lost access earlier this month.
Those states will be added to Texas, North Carolina, Montana, Mississippi, Virginia, Arkansas, and Utah, where the porn giant has already stopped operating.
All the states in which the porn purveyor is becoming inaccessible have passed laws intended to protect minors from accessing explicit material, requiring that pornography websites verify that users are legal adults before allowing them to access the obscene content.
Pornhub, and its parent company Aylo Global Entertainment which also owns other major pornography websites, have refused to implement age verification systems, instead preferring to shut off service in states with laws protecting minors from potentially harmful and addictive explicit material.
Some of the proposed age verification methods required by state laws have drawn scrutiny from privacy advocates because they require users to upload a scan of a valid government ID displaying their age.
Aylo claims that it supports age verification on its websites but argues that uploading government IDs would leave users’ personal information available to be stolen. As a result, the company has failed to take any measures to verify user ages.
The company has argued that the age verifications unconstitutionally restrict “protected speech” and claim that the proposed methods for age verification are the most restrictive method of protecting minors from their content, although they have not proposed an alternative method.
“Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors,” said Pornhub, in a statement.
The company also claimed that age verification systems would put minors at risk, although it is unclear how a program designed to prevent minors from accessing sexually explicit material would harm them.
The porn website has challenged age verification laws in states such as Louisiana and Texas, but those challenges ultimately failed.
Currently, in states without any age verification requirements, minors can access the sites with no more effort than they can access any other website.
In addition to requiring age verification, the Texas Law also requires porn websites to come with a disclaimer, similar to those present on tobacco products, warning of the potentially negative effects of consuming the material.
“The harms associated with viewing such material, including potential addiction, impaired brain development and function, and other emotional and mental illnesses,” says the required disclaimer in Texas.
